TimCookgoestoChinatodiscusssecurity,'strengtheningcooperation'

Apple CEO Tim Cook has met with a top Chinese government official in Beijing to discuss data security, according to the official Xinhua news agency (via Reuters). The meeting comes just days after Web censorship blog Great Fire reported that China was allegedly using a man-in-the-middle attack to get Apple ID information from Chinese users.

Reuters notes that Cook met with Vice Premier Ma Kai in Zhongnanhai, the Beijing complex housing China’s central government. That two exchanged views on “protection of users’ information” as well as “strengthening cooperation and in information and communication fields.”

According to the previous report, Chinese visitors to the iCloud website were being redirected to a fake site that resembles the real thing. A similar attack targeted Microsoft’s login.live.com website.

Great Fire originally noted:

This is clearly a malicious attack on Apple in an effort to gain access to usernames and passwords and consequently all data stored on iCloud such as iMessages, photos, contacts, etc. Unlike the recent attack on Google, this attack is nationwide and coincides with the launch today in China of the newest iPhone. While the attacks on Google and Yahoo enabled the authorities to snoop on what information Chinese were accessing on those two platforms, the Apple attack is different. If users ignored the security warning and clicked through to the Apple site and entered their username and password, this information has now been compromised by the Chinese authorities.

The blog told Reuters that Apple has since rerouted user data to get around the hack.